Spoil the dark

This is a story about interface design and capitalism. And K-pop.

I got really, really, really into K-pop earlier this year. It was completely unexpected—I went from never having heard a single example of the genre (and not listening to much pop music, from anywhere, at all) to pretty much only listening to it, all day, every day, for six months running now. (Ah, the neurodivergent brain.)

It started with a random encounter in Music League—just one or two songs, but I was enthusiastic, and the friend responsible made me a K-pop sampler playlist in response. Given my pop music ambivalence, I wasn’t sure I’d like any of the songs—but I liked all of them. So much. All the much. This is my thing now.

As much as I’ve fixated on the playlist (The Playlist), I’ve also tried to venture beyond it. It’s on Spotify (boo hiss), so I can easily explore more tracks from the groups I like best, or the algorithm’s suggestions for similar songs. (I’ve also been getting tips from my thirteen-year-old niece. I’ve officially entered my “learning about cool music from the youth” era.) But after months of adding, removing, and reordering a bunch of tracks, it suddenly hit me that I was fussing with someone else’s playlist.

My friend had created the playlist and shared it with me; she owned it, I just obsessed over it. I had assumed that my edits were local, as though the original playlist had been forked. (“Why is a Spotify playlist like a GitHub repo?” is a terrible riddle.)

My friend hardly minds that her playlist has more ITZY now than it started with, but I’m stuck on the fundamental error. Why did I think that’s how Spotify playlists worked? Why does it seem so hard to grok which playlists “belong” to me? Or, more accurately: why does the Spotify interface intentionally obscure the boundaries of ownership?

I’ll admit I’m not exactly a Spotify power user—hard to get good at something you hate—so there are certainly some signals I’ve missed. For example, I can see that my friend’s K-pop playlist is labeled as “public,” and that both our names are on it. But many other playlists in my library are marked this way, including whole albums I would never call a “playlist” and that I did not intentionally create. And even when I know a playlist is not mine, I can still make certain kinds of edits—like ordering the tracks alphabetically, or hiding songs—that don’t impact the playlist owner. The boundaries are indistinct.

That blurriness is to Spotify’s advantage. Whether or not I “own” my playlist may be low stakes, but it reflects the much larger, pricklier issue of who owns the content itself, something Spotify would very much like us not to think about. It’s no accident that as companies erode consumers’ and creators’ rights to media—playlists, ebooks, streaming films, software, our own posts—interfaces for that media get weaker, fainter, less precise. The dislocation is deliberate.

It’s in capitalism’s best interests if I feel disconnected from the media, if I don’t feel a sense of ownership. It isn’t “my” media. It’s not even the creators’ media. It’s the studios’ media, the publishers’ media, the distributors’ media, the shareholders’ media. We own nothing, we rent everything. We pay for the privilege of conditional access to things we used to buy, only to be asked to pay again, and again, and again.

Well. Another day, another complaint about the rent-seeking nature of late-stage capitalism, as a friend recently put it. I just hadn’t realized how it gets baked into the interface—how tenancy could be made so legible in the UX. Now that I’ve clocked it, I suspect it’s all I’ll see.

I could share my beloved K-pop playlist with you, but I still don’t trust the interface (or the company). Here’s an absolute banger, though, if you’re curious:

Lightning round

• “I was asked to give a land acknowledgement for today's No Kings demonstration. I don't do that shit so I gave ‘em something else instead.” [Raven Payment]

• A beautiful comic about trauma and healing [Sienna Gonzales]

• Two well-designed posters to support your disaster preparedness [Katy L. Wood]

• Need a sewing pattern? There’s a free database for that [Commercial Pattern Archive]

• A level-headed take on why it always feels like “UX is dead” [Dylan Wilbanks]

• A wonderfully pragmatic approach to content strategy in messy systems [Elaine Nelson]

• Content conferences better be talking about these banners for years to come [tumblr]

• “Local prince charming discovers that he’s actually very into the gothic fiance his parents have landed him with in order to try and establish peace with the local evil lair down the lane” [tumblr, of course]

November’s causes

This month, let’s give to two excellent organizations serving indigenous communities: one for food, the Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance, and one for water, the Navajo Water Project.

As always, don’t forget your local food pantries and mutual aid organizations! We’re entering a rough time of year under rougher economic conditions. Hang in there, friends.

Learn JavaScript (and do some good)

Please spread the word to the front-end folks in your life/office/Slack about JavaScript for Everyone! It’s very good, it’s very written by my husband, and it’s very on sale right now. In addition to the Black Friday discount code, there’s also an expensive-er-ing code, which actually still gives you a discount, but also sends a donation to Resilient Coders, a Boston-based coding bootcamp for people of color. (Learn more on Bluesky, or just watch Mat do a bit.)